Pythagoras of Samos
Pythagoras of Samos was an Ancient Greek polymath. He is credited with a vast number of ideas across mathematics, philosophy and music theory. It may be possible that many of these ideas could have preceded Pythagoras and his name was simply the name they got attached to. Whether that’s true or not, what’s more important is that generations of music theorists and composers after Pythagoras believed that they were building on his work. So whether or not Pythagoras himself contributed hugely to music tuning theory, the idea of him certainly did.
To this day we use terms like:
- Pythagoran tuning
- The Pythagorean family of temperaments
- Pythagorean means
- The Pythagorean comma
- The Pythagorean countercomma
- The Pythagorean limma
- The Pythagorean kleisma
- The Pythagorean diatonic semitone
- The Pythagorean chromatic semitone
- The Pythagorean augmented second
- The Pythagorean augmented fifth
- The Pythagorean diminished fourth
- The Pythagorean dominant seventh chord
- The Schismic-Pythagorean equivalence continuum
In tuning theory, “Pythagorean” has come to be almost synonymous with a 3-limit, pure just intonation approach to tuning. However, because “Pythagorean” and “Pythagoras’” have been applied to so many different concepts over the centuries, a lot of these terms are a little bit ill-defined, with potential for confusion around what exactly someone means when they say “Pythagorean tuning” or something of the sort. For this reason, gradually, some Pythagoras-centric music theory terms have fallen out of favour and been replaced with different terms like “3-limit”, “compton”, or various other things depending on the specific context.